fromCosmology
and Culture

Joel R. Primack

Cartoon from Sidney Harris, "Einstein Simplified"

There is no way to describe scientifically the origin of the universe without
treading upon territory held for millennia to be sacred. Beliefs about the origin of the
universe are at the root of our consciousness as human beings. This is a place where
science, willingly or unwillingly, encounters concerns traditionally associated with a
spiritual dimension.

For thousands of years people have wondered, speculated, and argued about the
origin of the universe without actually knowing anything about it. In the closing years of
the twentieth century, we're learning enough to begin to peer across the gulf that
separates our universe from its source at the beginning of -- or perhaps before -- the Big
Bang. A story is emerging in modern cosmology that will, if it follows the pattern of
earlier shifts in cosmology, change our culture in ways no one can yet predict...

Why is this important? In a speech given in July 1994... the Czech poet-president
Vaclav Havel said that the planet is in transition. As vastly different cultures collide,
all consistent value systems are collapsing. We cannot foresee the results. Science, which
has been the bedrock of industrial civilization for so long, he said, "fails to
connect with the most intrinsic nature of reality and with natural human experience. It is
now more a source of disintegration and doubt than a source of integration and meaning....
We may know immeasurably more about the universe than our ancestors did, and yet it
increasingly seems they knew something more essential about it than we do, something that
escapes us.... Paradoxically, inspiration for the renewal of this lost integrity can once
again be found in science...a science producing ideas that in a certain sense allow it to
transcend its own limits.... Transcendence is the only real alternative to
extinction." [1]

Modern cosmology is now undergoing a foundation-building revolution as it seeks a
verifiable description of the nature and origin of the universe. This revolution may
require that we transcend previous notions of space, time, and even reality. This seems to
me the kind of science Havel is hoping for-a science whose metaphors may illuminate not
only the subject matter of its own field but possibly also problems of humanity and the
earth from a cosmic perspective... How well our cosmology is interpreted in language
meaningful to ordinary people will determine how well its elemental stories are
understood, which may in turn affect how positive the consequences for society turn out to
be...

Anthropologists tell us that in virtually all traditional cultures, a cosmology is
what gives its members their fundamental sense of where they come from, who they are, and
what their personal role in life's larger picture might be. Cosmology is whatever picture
of the universe a culture agrees on. Together with the picture -- upholding the picture --
is a story that is understood to explain the sacred relationship between the way the world
is and the way human beings should behave. Other cultures' stories may not have been
correct by modern scientific standards, but they were valid by their own standards, and
they had the power to ground people's codes of behavior and their sense of identity within
a larger picture. This sense of identity may be part of what Havel feels has been lost.

What is the current popular picture of the universe?

If you ask a modern audience of people fascinated by cosmology but untrained in it
to close their eyes and visualize the universe, some will report seeing endless space with
stars scattered unimaginably far apart, others will see great spiral galaxies, and others
will see an exotic scene such as the rising of an ember-red moon over an unknown planet.
They do not realize that these are merely snapshots on a given scale of the universe -- no
more representative of the universe as a whole than is a single molecule of DNA or a
moonrise over your own backyard. The strange fact is that in modern Western culture people
have only the foggiest idea how to picture the universe, and certainly no consensus on it.

The lack of social consensus on cosmology in the modern world has caused many
people to close off their thinking to large issues and long time scales, so that small
matters dominate their consciousness. Of course, modern people do know much more about
many things than members of isolated, traditional cultures, but we are not so different in
our basic needs from people millennia ago. We have to get our sense of context somewhere.
It is worth looking at earlier cosmologies and the cultures in which they held sway to
understand how deep and in fact inextricable the connection is.

Earlier Cosmologies

In Biblical times when people looked up at a clear, blue sky, they saw a
transparent dome that covered the entire flat earth [2]. It was an awesome object, created
by God himself on the second day to hold back the endless quantities of blue water clearly
visible above it. There was water above and water beyond the horizon; doubtless there was
also water below. God had divided the waters "above" from the waters
"below" by constructing this immense dome that held open the space for dry land.
In the Hebrew Bible the dome is called "raqi'a," meaning a firm
substance, and rendered in the King James translation as "the firmament" -- a
concept that cannot be understood independently of the flat earth cosmology in which it
made sense. The firmament in Biblical times was understood to be firm only by the will of
God. If God were angered, as everyone believed had actually happened in the time of Noah,
"the windows of heaven" and "the fountains of the deep" could burst
open once again and those lovely blue waters would destroy the earth. God was said to have
promised not to do it a second time and to have sealed this covenant with the rainbow, but
who could predict the behavior of God? A watery Sword of Damocles hung over every creature
on the flat earth, and God held the threads.

In ancient Egypt the dome of the sky was represented by the goddess
Nut, who arched her back over the earth so that only her hands and feet touched the
ground. She was the night sky, and the sun, the god Ra, was born from her every morning
[3].

At more or less the same time that the Hebrew Bible as we know it was being
compiled -- about the 5th century BCE-Greek philosophers lived in a different
universe. Their earth was not flat and domed but a round celestial object. Aristotle honed
the picture so that the lunar sphere -- a sphere the size of the orbit of the moon -- was
defined as the border between the earthly world of change and decay inside and the
perfect, unchanging heavens outside.

With modifications by the 2d century CE Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy, who added
details to account for careful astronomical observations, Aristotle's image of concentric
spheres, and not the Bible's flat domed earth, had become by the Middle Ages the universe
for Jews, Moslems, and Christians alike.

Thus on a clear night in Medieval Europe, a person looking up into
the cathedral of the sky would have seen huge, transparent spheres nested inside each
other, encircling the center of the universe, the earth [4]. In an uneasy alliance with
Christian theology the planets were still identified with the Ancient Roman gods Mercury,
Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, and were still believed by many to be divine enough to
influence people's lives. Immediately outside the sphere of the fixed stars lay Heaven.
This was the monotheistic compromise with Aristotle and Ptolemy. God was physically right
out there. Everything between heaven and earth had its eternal place, chosen by God.

A worm in the soil, the lowliest serf, and the king himself had been
placed by God exactly where they belonged in the great chain of being, and there was no
questioning the divine hierarchy. The hierarchies of church, nobility, and the family were
divinely sanctioned -- they mirrored the cosmos itself.

We may scoff that they saw such a cosmos, but not that they took the cosmos as the
sacred model for society. They understood that humans can only be content by seeking to be
in harmony with the universe.This is a lesson our culture could do well to learn.

A new cosmology is subversive in the deepest sense of the word. The stable center
was torn out of the Medieval universe at the beginning of the 17th century,
when Galileo's observations showed that the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic earth-centered picture
was wrong, and Kepler's geometric interpretations of Tycho Brahe's data were built upon
the sun-centered model that Copernicus had put forward more than sixty years earlier [5].
Europe's conceptual universe was shaken. Like unreinforced buildings in an earthquake, the
power structures of society were irreparably cracked and undermined, and this was soon
obvious to all thinking people. As John Donne wrote in 1611 upon learning about Galileo's
telescopic observations:

The new Philosophy calls all in doubt,
The Element of fire is quite put out;
The Sun is lost, and th'earth, and no man's wit
Can well direct him where to look for it...
'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone;
All just supply, and all Relation;
Prince, Subject, Father, Son, are things forgot... [6]

..Eventually, following the lead of Bacon and Descartes, science protected itself
by entering into a de facto pact of noninterference with religion: science would restrict
its authority to the material world, and religion would hold unchallenged authority over
matters of human meaning and the spirit. By the time Isaac Newton was born in 1642, the
year of Galileo's death, the spoils of reality had been divided. The physical world and
the world of human meaning were now two separate universes...For more than 300 years,
since the time of Isaac Newton, science has been understood by most educated people to
imply an image of the universe as infinite, or at least incomprehensibly vast, almost
empty space, with stars scattered at great distances from each other but no center, no
purpose, no location for God, and no obvious implications for human behavior. Blaise
Pascal wrote, "engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing
and which know nothing of me, I am terrified.... The eternal silence of these infinite
spaces alarms me."[7] With an image of a cold universe in which humans play no
necessary role whatsoever, and no serious explanation of how things got this way, a
society suffers from a kind of rootlessness that prevents a sense of connection with the
universe.

...Scientific cosmology today has entered a golden age of discovery because of a
combination of extraordinary new instruments and telescopes on the one hand and daring
theoretical breakthroughs on the other. Data is flooding in, and cosmological theories are
being honed to levels of precision unimaginable even a generation ago. We may see in the
first decades of the 21st century the emergence of a new universe picture that
can be globally acceptable, and with this and the contributions of image-making writers,
artists, and spiritual visionaries, it is possible that the painful centuries-long hiatus
in human connection with the universe will end... This universe could become the most
inspiring source of new ways of interpreting and addressing the problems of our planet...

I will present one possible example of a way of looking at the universe that is
consistent, as far as it goes, with what we understand of the universe today yet is
simple, graphic, highly suggestive, and carries the mythic undertones essential to an
appreciation of the power of a cosmology....

The Cosmic Uroboros

[The universe] cannot be pictured the way a galaxy, for example, can be pictured
in a photograph or painting for at least three reasons: First, a photograph is of
something outside the eye, and the universe is not outside us, and we are never outside
it. We are it on our scale. Second, a photograph captures a moment in time, but the
universe encompasses time itself and no slice of time can even suggest that. And third,
the universe cannot be imagined as a picture because it's almost all invisible dark
matter. Moreover, all the radiation in the universe is also invisible to us, except for
the tiny band of frequencies between red and blue. It is essential to give up trying to
imagine the universe through the eyes, yet people need something visual.

The best solution I have found is to represent the universe using one of the
oldest symbols for it known to humankind, a symbol found in countless cultures around the
globe. It is the snake swallowing its tail -- an "uroboros" as the Greeks called
it. Earlier peoples used it to represent eternal life, partly because snakes were often
believed to live forever, since the sloughing of their skin was seen as a rebirth; and
partly because the circle of its body was a cycle without end. The uroboros had different
meanings in different cultures, but it tended to represent whatever was seen as
fundamental in a culture. Now it might carry a new interpretation.

From the Planck scale to the cosmic horizon, the visible universe encompasses
about 60 orders of magnitude. The size scales of the universe can thus be arrayed around
the serpent like minutes around the face of a clock. Sheldon Glashow originally suggested
this symbol, with the swallowing of the tail expressing his hope for a unification of the
theories governing the largest and smallest scales [8]. I noticed [9] that there are many
connections across the diagram: electromagnetism dominates the bottom; the strong and weak
interactions not only dominate on nuclear scales but also describe energy generation in
stars and determine the composition of planetary systems; and dark matter, which is
gravitationally dominant on galactic and larger scales, may be associated with the physics
of still smaller scales.

The Cosmic Uroboros represents the universe as a continuity
of vastly different size scales, of which the largest and smallest may be linked by
gravity. Sixty orders of magnitude separate the very smallest from the very largest.
Traveling around the serpent from head to tail, we move from the scale of the cosmic
horizon to that of a galaxy supercluster, a single galaxy, the solar system, the sun, the
moon, a mountain, a human, a single-celled creature, a strand of DNA, an atom, a nucleus,
the scale of the weak interactions, and approaching the tail the extremely small size
scales on which physicists hope to find evidence for Supersymmetry (SUSY), dark matter
particles such as the axion, and a Grand Unified Theory. There are other connections
between large and small: electromagnetic forces are most important from the scale of atoms
to that of mountains; strong and weak forces govern both atomic nuclei and stars; cosmic
inflation may have created the large-scale of the universe out of quantum-scale
fluctuations.

Why is this symbol useful? People asked to visualize "the universe" will
far more often think of the largest thing they know of than the smallest. Few realize that
the universe exists on all scales, everywhere, all the time. This is a truly extravagant
thought. Largeness is by no means the most important characteristic of the universe.
Focusing on it makes people feel small, not because they are, but because they are simply
ignoring all scales smaller than themselves in thinking about the universe. On the Cosmic
Uroboros, as I call it, if the mouth swallowing the tail is drawn at the top, humans (at
one meter or so) fall more or less at the bottom -- i.e., at the center of all the size
scales in the visible universe. Many students are so stunned by this apparently special
place that they refuse to believe it and insist it must be a result of some tricky choice
of units. I don't know if the center of the Cosmic Uroboros is in fact special, but
finding themselves there certainly strikes a chord with most people. Perhaps it hearkens
back to the soul-satisfying cosmology of the Middle Ages, where earth was truly the center
of the universe. ...